Steepenwolf

I finished it last week. I'm pretty sure the housemate at the start mentioned that none of the events were real. Steppenwolfe never had any visitors, especially none he danced with or slept with.

I guess the whole book is just a fantasy. It's Steppenwolfe trying to figure out how to get over himself so he can become something better, and the only way he can imagine it happening is if some benevolent friend takes control and teaches him how to dance and how to love and be a real person.

I think the ending is basically drawing attention to the fact that everything in the book is a fantasy. ie the magic theater is the book. Steppenwolfe saying that he'll go back into the magic theater is him saying that he'll keep writing. This book failed to fix his problems, but hopefully the next time he delves into his fantasies and psyche, he'll be more successful.

>Steppenwolfe never had any visitors, especially none he danced with or slept with.
*except his wife, I mean

...

youtube.com/watch?v=LtH7l-dhHZQ

muh middle class ennui

Honestly, made me a better person after reading it.

Some people will say this book is really edgy because of Harry's initial thoughts on himself.
>muhself
>muh wolf
>sad.jpg
>muh autism

but he gets a lot better as the story progresses. The themes Hesse wishes to convey are found in the later two thirds of the book, not the first third.

As a pretty young guy myself, i took it as a warning to not let life slip through your fingers. That even if you fail, it is always better to have done something rather than nothing. And also that it's ok to indulge yourself in a little bit of self-loathing so long as you get over it and don't let it control your life. I could go on and on about this book, i just love it.

Wow, never thought of it that way.

Definitely drives home how totally alone Harry is.

Harry's nostalgia for bourgeois comfort in conflict with a decent and authentic life hits me hard.

Good, but not Hesse's best. What annoyed self-important young me about it was that the solution to the problems of life was supposed to lie in Humor. Didn't fit into my delusions of grandeur

hesse himself said sometime that he didn't think it was a book for young people, so i'm holding it off until i'm 40 or so

I read it when I was 19, and i thought it was great. Kicked my sorry ass into gear so i didn't end up like Harry.

Also this. Great book.

Honestly, if you haven't already independently grasped the message of the book by the time you're past being a teenager, you're probably not very mentally developed.

A very good book. Sadly, as with Catcher in the Rye, people speak disparagingly about it in order to feel better about themselves and their unimportant lives.

It's my favourite book, I loved the romance between Harry and Hermine.

>the main character is like 50
i don't like that

very jungian

Oh look, a book the german Coelho!
My aunt loves his self-help books. She read them at the college when she was young

just finished rereading it today, well you could be right.
Also it made me wonder how the fuck did he dance while he had trouble walking? Could someboedy redpill me on this book?

Love Steppenwolf but Demian is better.

Steppenwolf helped get me over my oneitis.

Yeah, it's cool that the narrator thinks he's a werewolf (but is really just a recluse pseudo-academic) and then reads a manuscript that describes fake werewolves and outs them as poseurs.

Neat that the preface, by the manuscript's fictional finder and publisher, records the impression that the horrors of the middle ages were non-existent:
>"A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. [...] Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap"
Which strikes me as the rightwing describing the basic marxist principle that all that is solid melts into air.

The book is written in the late 1920s and exposes all of the nasty jingoist, racist, reactionary bullshit that was the bizarre engine of history in the '30s and '40s, but written while Herr Beer Hall Putsch was banned from public speaking. It is therefore an oddly prescient volume when it describes respectable opinion in Germany as anti-semitic & anti-communist, as unwilling to blame itself for the world war, as loathing persons who express disapproval of the Kaiser and war-mongering, and so on. It manifestly names "the next holocaust" as the fruits of same, joining R. Palme Dutt in making a horrible, horribly accurate prediction regarding German fascism.

Presents an interesting attempt to read Goethe's Faust using the good doctor as a model for the Steppenwolf itself.

Nice moment of insult to the reader when the courtesan asks the narrator to explain what he had been reading, which was the Treatise on the Steppenwolf aforesaid:
>"Oh, Steppenwolf is magnificent! And are you the Steppenwolf? Is that meant for you?"
casting the reader of this volume into the role of the narrator fairly expressly.

I have the same reaction here as to Byron's Manfred, who also teeters at the edge of the precipice: do us all a fucking favor and jump off the cliff on page 1. That way, we needn't read an entire volume of self-obsessed amphigory about suicide.

Doesn't help that the middle third of the volume is dominated by a bizarre love story involving several flappers/courtesans who pull the suicidal narrator away from the cliff by means of the terpsichorean arts as well as some hard fucking. The final third is dominated by drug-addled phantasmagoria, with silly appearances by Mozart and Goethe.

Too much overt nietzschean influence. Too much use of the term bourgeois to refer to aesthetic matters, rather than economics. I can definitely see why all of the biggest English department douchebag undergraduates when I was at university wanted to write their BA thesis on this novel, forget that it's written in Deutsch, conceiving themselves as the steppenwolf rising above the herd, a true intellectual amid bourgeois banality, a proper aesthete among the declining arts of a spenglerian society, someone who really understands how shit is. It's a hipster manifesto.

>german Coelho!
it's ok if you hate Herman hesse. but that's too much, way too much

>t. A TRUE social democrat

You just sold me on this book user, thanks.

>. I can definitely see why all of the biggest English department douchebag undergraduates when I was at university wanted to write their BA thesis on this novel, forget that it's written in Deutsch, conceiving themselves as the steppenwolf rising above the herd, a true intellectual amid bourgeois banality, a proper aesthete among the declining arts of a spenglerian society, someone who really understands how shit is. It's a hipster manifesto.

the funny thing is i'm pretty sure hesse said he wrote it as something not to be, like you're not supposed to think that dude is cool, sort of like patrick bateman or gordon gecko, but edgy kids starting thinking he's a role model instead of a bad guy

I'm busy reading other shit. Give me the gestalt on what was wrong with the MC in Steppenwolf, and what the message was.

i don't know, i dropped it when harry whatever started talking shit about jazz, i was like some german sonofabitch wanna talk shit about jazz? fuck this shit.... i usually like hesse but i couldnt get into it, but i remember doing some preliminary reading about it before starting and he was like "this guy is not meant to be emulated, he's not a role model" or something, personally i think demian or narcissus and goldmund is his best, siddartha's good but it kind of feels like a rip-off indian version of "julian the hospitaler" by flaubert, which was superior

He eventually likes jazz after he learns to dance, gets laid, and starts to let himself loose. You gave up on it too soon. It's a story of redemption after being a massive tightwad for five decades.

Steppenwolfe has two modes of thinking. In one he's this high-minded guy who has really lofty opinions about art, and in the other he's the steppenwolfe, a lonely creature who just wants to eat and fuck and be happy. Each side hates the other and so he's basically perpetually unhappy.

The book is about how comical and narrow-minded the idea of having two warring personalities is as well as touching on issues of becoming a true artist, or, as Steppenwolfe calls them, "the immortals."

oh so it's like a late life bildungsroman, maybe i'll check it out again, i still have a copy, i read another book from hesse about old age, not one of his hits, but a minor work, can't remember the name for the life of me, but it was about the guy who's son dies so he takes up his old buddies offer to travel to asia or whatever, the only take away i got from it is that summers seem hotter as you age, which explains why baby boomers are so sure global warming is going to kill us all, cuz these summers are way more brutal than when i was a kid (he doesn't talk about global warming shit was written in the 30s or something, but that was what i got from it)